Electricity sector trade unions have objected to the National System Operator’s report on the 17 October island-wide power failure, calling it unclear and demanding that the public be told whether substandard coal was what disabled the generating units involved.
The unions’ central complaint is that the report, submitted to the Public Utilities Commission of Sri Lanka (PUCSL), sets out the sequence of the collapse without addressing coal quality at all, Hiru News reported at 8.07 p.m. Colombo time on Saturday.
That is a pointed objection, because the condition of imported coal has been a live controversy in Sri Lanka’s power sector for weeks — well before the blackout. The chairman of the parliamentary oversight committee on infrastructure, S.M. Marikkar, put the cost of substandard coal at Rs. 18.3 billion when he tabled a document in Parliament on 20 October, and an opposition MP blamed inferior coal for the Norochcholai failure the following day.
What the report says happened
The filing restates the technical sequence this desk reported earlier on Saturday. At about 11.43 a.m. on 17 October, 187 MW supplied by the first generating unit at the Norochcholai Lakvijaya plant was lost from the system within 450 milliseconds. System frequency fell sharply to 48.75 Hz, and the entire grid collapsed within 4.1 seconds of the event beginning.
All five stages of the automatic disconnection scheme that is meant to protect system stability when frequency falls operated at that moment, without preventing the collapse.
Hydro stations tripped too
Hiru’s account adds detail not in the earlier filings. Besides the Norochcholai units, generating units at Victoria, Kotmale, Randenigala, Samanalawewa and Laxapana, and at several other hydro plants, also went offline as their protection systems operated.
Restoring the full transmission system took five hours and fifteen minutes. The report records technical problems and operational delays at some plants during the restart — in particular, a fault in an auxiliary system at a generating unit of the Yugadanavi power plant.
The root cause remains unestablished
The report does not confirm the specific underlying reason the output of Norochcholai’s first unit fell away. The National System Operator has said a detailed report will be submitted to PUCSL in due course.
That gap is what the unions are pressing on. The preliminary report establishes what happened second by second; it does not say why the unit failed — and so it neither supports nor rules out the coal-quality explanation that has been circulating since the outage.
Not reported
The filing does not name the unions involved, say how many took part, or state whether the objection was made in a joint statement, at a media briefing or in a letter to PUCSL. It gives no date for the detailed report and does not say whether PUCSL has responded to either the preliminary report or the unions’ complaint. It does not report any response from the National System Operator, the Ceylon Electricity Board or the Ministry of Power and Energy to the coal allegation.
Single-source. This desk searched for the same event on Daily Mirror, NewsFirst, Ada Derana, EconomyNext, Colombo Gazette and Island and found no other verified newsroom carrying the unions’ objection at the time of writing. Ada Derana’s site has been returning CloudFront 403 errors to this desk for roughly 50 consecutive days and could not be checked directly; EconomyNext was returning HTTP 520 server errors site-wide. The technical figures above are independently corroborated by the Daily Mirror and NewsFirst filings cited in the earlier article.